Hubble image shows deepest view of universe ever

Feast your eyes on this: The deepest and most detailed view of the universe that exists on Earth.

The assembled image below was released today by NASA, showing a what actually lies within a relatively small field of view just a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon.

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. (Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team)

Impressive, right? But maybe not as impressive as the individual pieces.

In the gallery below, take a look at what else the Hubble telescope has spotted over the years. (Captions below images.)

OK, enough eye candy. Now stop and think about what’s really being shown in the NASA image released Tuesday. This image, patched together from 10 years worth of photos, features about 5,500 galaxies. The faintest galaxies are reportedly one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can detect.

Magnificent spiral galaxies similar in shape to our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy appear in this image, as do the large, fuzzy red galaxies where the formation of new stars has ceased. These red galaxies are the remnants of dramatic collisions between galaxies and are in their declining years. Peppered across the field are tiny, faint, more distant galaxies that were like the seedlings from which today’s magnificent galaxies grew. The history of galaxies — from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way — is laid out in this one remarkable image.

One more fun fact for you to wrap your head around: The image reveals galaxies 13.2 billion years back in time. NASA researchers are calling the image a “time tunnel into the distant past.”